Douglas McCauley is a Santa Barbara-based marine scientist who is looking to technology for new ways to take on some of the ocean’s biggest challenges. Along with his colleagues at the Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI)—a UCSB-based collaboration between marine biologists, tech innovators, and citizen scientists—McCauley has helped develop numerous platforms to monitor threats to marine ecosystems.

Rhianna Lakin is the force behind the leading online community for women interested in drones. She’s proactively carved out a space for women in a male dominated industry and is challenging drone pilots everywhere to use the technology for good. She’s hoping to use drones as a powerful tool to expose and combat deforestation, aid in search and rescue missions and humanitarian relief, amplify the voices of protesters and inspire the next generation to do the same.

Jeff and Alicia Raymond are farming for the future. As climate change and accelerating population growth contribute to increasing food scarcity, people like Jeff are turning their minds to practical innovations.

Jeff and Alicia have created a fully self-sufficient ecosystem in their backyard, a working prototype of a system that can provide food even in extreme environments like Mars. Online, he’s known as The Real Martian. Offline, his work could help create a more sustainable agricultural industry for all.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill 23,000 people every year in the United States, and the United Nations estimates that by 2050, more people will die from antibiotic-resistant infections than currently die from cancer.

Discovered 100 years ago, bacteriophages—viruses that eat bacteria—might provide an answer. But phage therapy has only been approved for use on humans in the former Soviet Union. Motherboard travels to Georgia to meet the doctors using phage therapy today, and meets with the American scientists trying to normalize phage therapy in the United States.

Creating a walking robot is no easy task. But despite numerous efforts throughout the years, people are still trying to create robots that can truly walk around our environments like we do. Motherboard met with Agility Robotics, a small start up in Oregon that is one of many who are trying to crack the code of creating the perfect bipedal robot.

Today Rick Ramgattie will assess the security of the D-Link DIR-865L router to show how he can chain vulnerabilities in both its web and storage interfaces to get root shell access. This would give an attacker full access to the device thus allowing them to spy on the user’s web traffic, redirect the user to phishing sites, or add the router to a botnet.

When you plug in a USB drive the router shares it over an anonymous Samba share, which an attacker can abuse. Since the Samba server follows symbolic links we can then explore the entire file system rather than just the USB drive. The router stores the web interface password in a clear text file, so with Samba we download it. The router’s web application has a file inclusion vulnerability, so we can write files where we want. Finally we show with a race condition vuln, we can use the file inclusion vulnerability to overwrite a script with our desired included script and have it execute.

By chaining these vulnerabilities together, we can launch a Telnet server, achieving full root access to the device.

When it comes to the Internet, our connections are generally controlled by telecom companies. But a group of people in Detroit is trying to change that.

Motherboard met with the members of the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a group that is building their own wireless networks from the ground up in order to provide affordable and high-speed internet to prevent the creation of a digital class system.

Today we’re going to hack a router with client-side authentication using http traffic inspector (e.g. BURP Suite) and a browser. Many commercially available small-office and home routers perform authentication on the client-browser, which is weak and may be breached easily. This can be easily abused by attackers who can bypass the authentication and then attack the rest of the devices on the router’s network.

An adversary can reverse engineer the authentication mechanism by going through the source code in the browser. Being able to bypass the authentication on the router will allow an adversary to traverse the rest of the network, manipulate network configurations, and open up other access points including ports to direct traffic in and out of the network. Using BURP lets the user see and edit the requests and responses sent to and from the router’s web interface.

Today we’re going to hack a router with Client-side authentication using http traffic inspector (e.g. BURP Suite) and a browser. Many commercially available small-office and home routers perform authentication on the client-browser, which is weak and may be breached easily. This can be easily abused by attackers who can bypass the authentication and then attack the rest of the devices on the router’s network. An adversary can reverse engineer the authentication mechanism by going through the source code in the browser. Being able to bypass the authentication on the router will allow an adversary to traverse the rest of the network, manipulate network configurations, and open up other access points including ports to direct traffic in and out of the network. Using Burp lets the user see and edit the requests and responses sent to and from the router’s web interface.

The rechargeable batteries in your laptop, your cell phone, your headphones: all of these can be used to power your life and take you off the grid. DIY Powerwalls – rechargeable lithium-ion battery installations, made from recycled batteries – are the future of power, whether you know it or not.

We visited Jehu Garcia, a DIY Powerwall builder and enthusiast, and the folks at EV West in Southern California as well as the University of Michigan Battery Lab to see just how DIY Powerwalls can power your home, your car, and even the rest of your neighborhood

If the processes powering the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core could be recreated on Earth, it would be one of the most important events in the history of our species. Nuclear fusion power plants could end our dependency on fossil fuels and provide a virtually limitless, highly efficient source of clean energy.

We went to two of the world’s leading nuclear fusion research centers—Sandia National Labs in New Mexico and General Fusion outside Vancouver—to see how close we are to bringing the power of the stars down to Earth.

A mile under the Earth’s crust, inside the gold mines of South Africa, lie the deepest living animals on the planet. These creatures are called nematodes and they’re the tiniest multicellular worms on Earth.

The discovery of these worms thriving in extreme environments previously deemed uninhabitable has opened up clues and implications for potential, non-intelligent extraterrestrial life.

The one that Belgian zoologist Gaetan Borgonie discovered was nicknamed the “Devil Worm” because it was found over 2 miles underground at over a 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dear Future is Motherboard and CNET’s new documentary series built on the premise that technology and science are still capable of wowing us. Fusion energy, DIY off-grid energy systems, decentralized mesh networks, the search for life on other planets, and humanoid robots aren’t far-off science fiction, they’re breakthroughs that are happening right now.

The ubiquity of drones in the modern world has recently birthed a new sport: drone racing. Motherboard’s Erik Franco went to meet drone racing ‘it’ girl Zoe Stumbaugh as she prepares for a major race and competes with the fastest model she’s ever built.

In this episode of Speed Daemons, our host Derek Mead seeks to understand the individuals and machines that venture at high speeds through the brutal terrain of the Mojave desert.

Derek gets some first hand experience of the desert with the help of legendary trophy trucker, BJ Baldwin, who drives our host at 120 miles an hour and soars 25 feet into the air. But to also tap into the history of desert off-roading, Derek spends some quality time with dune buggy spirit animal, Willie Kalajian, a man who’s dedicated many decades of his life to living in the desert and fixin’ up VW Bugs.

In this episode we learn how the extreme conditions of the Mojave desert can create such incredible pieces of technology like trophy trucks and dune buggies and colorful characters like BJ and Willie.

Have you ever been sure that something was a fact? Perhaps something you ‘know’ to be an unequivocal truth, so you stroll to Wikipedia to look into it and upon getting there realise you were wrong. Perhaps you’ve even had a group of friends agree upon the validity of a statement, only to find you’re all wrong. Now, imagine a huge cluster of seemingly unconnected people claiming something existed in exact terms, only to not be able to find concrete evidence of it. That’s close to what a portion of Overwatch players are experiencing at the moment.

The Mandela Effect is a fascinating concept. It essentially posits the idea of mass groups of people remembering something about reality that is false. It received its namesake from troops of people claiming, assuredly, that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Of course, Mandela didn’t die until 2013. It’s far from the only cited example. Hannibal Lecter never says ‘Hello Clarice’ in Silence of the Lambs, the Berenstain Bears was never spelt with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’, and Sinbad never made a genie movie. Many claim the veridical nature of these things, but while they’re close to the truth, none are exact. There’s a lot of speculation as to how this happens. The more out there suggest this is an instance of parallel universes getting a little muddled with our own. Even further out there, it’s time-travellers going back and affecting our past. There is, of course, a more mundane explanation: our minds are quite bad at recollection – with a scoop of memory conformity on top.

The effect has reared its head in a new, rather unexpected place: the colourful battlegrounds of Overwatch. It comes in the form of a Reaper and Mercy interaction you can hear in the waiting area before a game starts. The line supposedly goes:

When Keiji Inafune’s Mega Man spiritual successor Mighty No. 9 launched its Kickstarter campaign way back in 2013, developer Comcept offered a cardboard box and full-colour manual as collector’s items for the devoted 16,155 backers who pledged $60 or more. Now, more than a year after the game’s oft delayed launch, premium backers are getting their goods, but the results are a little lacking.

As revealed by Twitter user Isfet, the Mighty No. 9’s box is actually a series of flat sheets with some assembly required.

While the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility library is pretty solid these days, there’s one oft ignored section of the Xbox 360’s roster that hasn’t been carried over: XBLIG (Xbox Live Indie Games). To make up for this abandoned corner of last-gen, developer Bootdisk Revolution is re-releasing its acclaimed 2012 shmup, Bleed, on both Xbox One and PS4.

Priced at €9.99 / $9.99, this re-release will arrive on PS4 23rd August and Xbox One the following day.

Bleed is a genre hybrid that blends twin-stick shooting and puzzle-platforming with a dash of stylish Platinum-esque slow-motion baked in.

The meteoric rise of ethereum has fueled something of a gold rush for people looking to get in on the action by mining ether themselves. This requires building a custom “mining” computer from scratch, which isn’t quite as hard as it sounds.

In this how-to video, Motherboard contributor Daniel Oberhaus walks you through the step-by-step instructions for building an ethereum mining rig from the ground up. By the end of the tutorial you’ll be well on your way to mining ether and contributing to the maintenance of the ethereum network with your own computing power.

Minecraft on Switch is one of the best uses to date of Nintendo’s hybrid design, delivering a complete rendition of the classic game with full four-player functionality – even when undocked and gaming on the go. But its launch was marred by two factors: a lacklustre 720p resolution even when docked with your HDTV, along with noticeably jarring performance drops in split-screen mode. Developer 4J Studios promised that it would look into a full 1080p upgrade and it has duly delivered – and not only that, despite the 2.25x boost to resolution, performance in some split-screen scenarios is improved too.

The 1080p Switch upgrade is understated in 4J Studios’ patch notes, hidden in a line of bug fixes. It’s the only visual upgrade listed too. According to an interview with the Time website, CTO Richard Reavy says that “everything else is unchanged at present. We really just wanted to make sure jumping up the resolution wouldn’t cause any problems.” Indeed, at launch, Microsoft confirmed that switching resolutions on the fly between Switch’s docked and undocked modes caused issues with the HUD. But on patch 1.06, clearly 4J Studios has overcome the problem, and it all just clicks together.

As you can see in the video and the comparison zoomers on this page, Minecraft’s stark visual style benefits enormously from the resolution upgrade, bringing it right up to our level of expectations for the launch code – and despite compromises in other areas, it even compares fairly well with PS4’s 1080p image too. Native full HD resolution pays huge dividends for anyone using a 1080p TV: we’re no longer at the mercy of Switch’s scaler, and users get a true 1:1 pixel match from the console. And as you’d expect, even the menu overlays run at 1080p.

Sony has announced its August Instant Game Collection, i.e. its line-up of free games for PlayStation Plus subscribers coming on 1st August.

The PS4 headliners are Just Cause 3 and Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. The former open-world adventure we found fun for a whirl, but too repetitive to sustain longterm interest, while our Tom Phillips called the latter, a standalone spin-off of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, a “strong, self-contained narrative” in his review.

Elsewhere, there’s the PS4 party game That’s You, a title that uses the PlayLink feature wherein players use their mobile phones as controllers and submit photos and doodles to reply to whimsical prompts.

Square Enix has announced Final Fantasy 15 fans can test the game’s multiplayer DLC next week.

Final Fantasy 15’s multiplayer expansion, subtitled Comrades, will be available as a closed online test on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One from 3rd to 8th August. Players can create their own custom avatars and join together with up to three others to participate in multiplayer quests.

There’s a bunch of cool extras to unlock in Metroid: Samus Returns – but you’ll only get them if you have four Metroid-themed amiibo.

The 3DS remake of Metroid 2 will launch alongside two new Metroid amiibo figurines – one for Samus, one of a Metroid – and will also be compatible with the two existing Smash Bros. amiibo figures for Samus and Zero Suit Samus.

Each of these four will give you something extra in Metroid: Samus Returns, and a Nintendo spokesperson has confirmed to Eurogamer that “this unlockable content is only unlocked using amiibo”.

Over four years ago the cute, cartoony platformer A Hat in Time raised nearly $300k on Kickstarter, yet it remained stuck in development for ages as developer Gears for Breakfast continued to expand on its adventure. Now, over three years past its expected launch window, A Hat in Time is finally coming to fruition with an autumn release slated for PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mac.

This is the first time it’s been confirmed for consoles. It’s also the first time that Humble Bundle, who has taken on publishing duties, is launching a game on consoles.

A Hat in Time looks very Nintendo-inspired as it’s a puzzle platformer centered around a girl with magic hats who must explore a bright, colourful planet to find her lost headgear.

Laura June, writing for The Outline: It’s a well-known, well-documented fact that women entrepreneurs face an uphill battle in the fight to get funding for their businesses. But a new study suggests that it can actually be almost impossible. According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Venture Capital, having even one woman on a company’s team makes them far less likely to get funding than an entirely male one. In fact, an all male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them. The study was done by researchers at Babson College and Wellesley, and looked at data on 6,793 companies funded between 2011 and 2013. This is the first large-scale study in a decade to focus on women’s efforts to get funding, and it’s not encouraging. The authors write, “We did not determine any significant performance differences between companies with women CEOs from companies with men CEOs, so it is quite surprising that women are still, practically speaking, shut out of the market for venture capital funding, both as CEOs and participants of executive teams.”

Nubia is the next civ coming to Civilization 6, developer Firaxis has announced.

Amanitore leads Nubia. She was one of the greatest queens of the Kushitic Kingdom of Meroë, also known as Nubia. Her reign is considered to be the most prosperous time for the Kushites. The site of her palace, Jebel Barkal in modern-day Sudan, is a World Heritage Site.

Nubia’s unique unit is the Pitati Archer, an ancient arrow unit which is stronger and faster than the traditional Archer. This makes ranged units the core of your military strategy.

Welcome to the Robot

Douglas McCauley is a Santa Barbara-based marine scientist who is looking to technology for new ways to take on some of the ocean’s biggest challenges. Along with his colleagues at the Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI)—a UCSB-based collaboration between marine biologists, … Read More

Pinball was once an American obsession. Now, the arcade classic is making a comeback, but the repair technicians skilled enough to repair these complex machines are limited. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard talks to two remaining pinball … Read More

Rhianna Lakin is the force behind the leading online community for women interested in drones. She’s proactively carved out a space for women in a male dominated industry and is challenging drone pilots everywhere to use the technology for good. … Read More

Jeff and Alicia Raymond are farming for the future. As climate change and accelerating population growth contribute to increasing food scarcity, people like Jeff are turning their minds to practical innovations. Jeff and Alicia have created a fully self-sufficient ecosystem … Read More

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill 23,000 people every year in the United States, and the United Nations estimates that by 2050, more people will die from antibiotic-resistant infections than currently die from cancer. Discovered 100 years ago, bacteriophages—viruses that eat bacteria—might provide … Read More

Creating a walking robot is no easy task. But despite numerous efforts throughout the years, people are still trying to create robots that can truly walk around our environments like we do. Motherboard met with Agility Robotics, a small start … Read More

Today Rick Ramgattie will assess the security of the D-Link DIR-865L router to show how he can chain vulnerabilities in both its web and storage interfaces to get root shell access. This would give an attacker full access to the … Read More

When it comes to the Internet, our connections are generally controlled by telecom companies. But a group of people in Detroit is trying to change that. Motherboard met with the members of the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a group that … Read More

Today we’re going to hack a router with client-side authentication using http traffic inspector (e.g. BURP Suite) and a browser. Many commercially available small-office and home routers perform authentication on the client-browser, which is weak and may be breached easily. This can … Read More

Today we’re going to hack a router with Client-side authentication using http traffic inspector (e.g. BURP Suite) and a browser. Many commercially available small-office and home routers perform authentication on the client-browser, which is weak and may be breached easily. This can … Read More

The rechargeable batteries in your laptop, your cell phone, your headphones: all of these can be used to power your life and take you off the grid. DIY Powerwalls – rechargeable lithium-ion battery installations, made from recycled batteries – are … Read More

If the processes powering the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core could be recreated on Earth, it would be one of the most important events in the history of our species. Nuclear fusion power plants could end our dependency on … Read More

A mile under the Earth’s crust, inside the gold mines of South Africa, lie the deepest living animals on the planet. These creatures are called nematodes and they’re the tiniest multicellular worms on Earth. The discovery of these worms thriving … Read More

Dear Future is Motherboard and CNET’s new documentary series built on the premise that technology and science are still capable of wowing us. Fusion energy, DIY off-grid energy systems, decentralized mesh networks, the search for life on other planets, and … Read More

The ubiquity of drones in the modern world has recently birthed a new sport: drone racing. Motherboard’s Erik Franco went to meet drone racing ‘it’ girl Zoe Stumbaugh as she prepares for a major race and competes with the fastest … Read More

As we near the release of the iPhone 8, Motherboard editor-in-chief, Jason Koebler, wanted to get a sneak peak so he ordered a dummy model from China. READ MORE: http://bit.ly/2wYlX8W Subscribe to MOTHERBOARD: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-To-MOTHERBOARD Follow MOTHERBOARD Facebook: http://ift.tt/110J9Nz Twitter: http://twitter.com/motherboard … Read More

In this episode of Speed Daemons, we explore how Miami’s natural environment and complex history led to its love affair with speedboats. We met with the racers, manufactures, and stuntmen who are the center of Miami’s speedboat obsession. Our host … Read More